Episode 393: 5 Things You Need to Know & Consider Before Starting a Gut Healing Protocol
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We’re bringing it back to the gut!
If you’ve ever started a gut protocol and thought, “Why do I feel worse?” or “Why did this work… and then completely fall apart?” this episode is for you. Erin is sharing what a gut protocol is, why going straight into antimicrobial “kill” mode can backfire, and how ignoring the body’s internal environment can lead to flare-ups and stalled healing.
You’ll also learn Erin’s five step B.L.A.S.T framework to make your gut protocol results stick: think Bowels, Liver, Adrenals, Secretory IgA, and Trauma.
Your nervous system has EVERYTHING to do with gut results, and a more supportive, whole-body approach helps the body do what it already knows how to do: heal.
In this episode:
Why jumping straight into antimicrobials is a red flag and can overload your system
What Erin’s sudden wine reactions, hives, and crushing headaches reveal about histamine and gut imbalance
How constipation and sluggish detox pathways can turn a healing protocol into nonstop reactions and flare-ups
Why chronic stress hormones sabotage gut immunity, digestion, and your ability to clear infections
How unresolved trauma and a dysregulated nervous system can keep the body stuck in survival mode
Resources mentioned:
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Join the waitlist for Manifest Your Health.
Listen to the TFN client case study episode with Meg O’Neill.
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And so when we think problem with the gut, oftentimes our first thought is to go right to the infection or the suspected infection. So we want to go right into the kill protocol portion of a gut protocol, like kill the infection, kill the parasite, kill the yeast, kill whatever's there, and we treat it as an act of warfare, rather than taking a step back and saying, hey, what's the overall environment that created this problem in the first place? Why did the person get this infection in the first place? Truly figuring out root cause necessitates asking the question, why did this happen?
Welcome to The Funk’tional Nutrition Podcast, spelled with a K. Because we do things a little differently around here. I'm your host, Erin Holt, and I've got 15 years of clinical experience as a functional nutritionist and mindset coach creating a new model that I call Intuitive Functional Medicine™, where we combine root cause medicine with the innate intelligence of your body. This is where science meets self trust. Your body already knows how to heal, and this show is going to show you how. If you're looking for new ways of thinking about your health, be sure to follow and share with a friend, because you never know whose life you might change.
Hello my friends and happy 2026. This is the second podcast drop of the new year and I'm very excited to be here with you guys. Despite the fact that my voice is a little bit rickety rockety, I mean, is it even the holidays if you don't get a little bit of a whisper of a cold or a cough right after the big holiday push? I really, truly am excited to be here with you because I have this newfound excitement for this podcast. It's been over eight years and I spent a lot of time thinking last year of what the wellness space is doing, what the podcast wellness space is doing, and what do I want to do and what direction do I want to take it? And I have some pretty clear intentions.
And that is coupled with the fact that I actually have more creative space to dedicate to this podcast. If you listen to a couple of my recent episodes, I've talked about some changes that we've made here and you know, I owe that totally to my team. So blessings to my team for taking some stuff off of my plate so I can show up in bigger, bolder ways here for you guys on the podcast and in other places and spaces. I'm really, truly excited about this year and excited about today's topic. We're bringing it back to the gut as we do. And today I'm going to uncover the five things that you need to know and consider before starting a gut healing protocol. And what even is a gut healing protocol? Maybe we just start there. A gut protocol is a structured, time bound plan, meaning you don't do it forever.
It is not a set it and forget it. You do it for a period of time that addresses any imbalance going on in the gut and this might be in response to symptoms that you're experiencing or, or lab test results that you've received, or both. Imbalances that are addressed in a gut protocol include, but they're not limited to pathogen, overgrowths or infection. So gut protocols often include antimicrobials or antifungals to address those things. And when we're introducing those things, it can be often called or referred to as a kill protocol because the goal is to kill off those infections. Okay, so that's what a gut protocol is. And today I'm going to outline the five step process that we take everyone through when we're starting them on a gut protocol. And these are steps that we're taking or considering during or even before the antimicrobial kill process.
So this is exactly how we approach our one on one clients as a way to prevent adverse reactions. Because sometimes when somebody starts a healing protocol, they can have adverse reactions pop up. They're not always preventable, but there are certain steps that you can take to make them a lot less severe or not happen at all. Number two, we do this because we want to make sure your gut protocol is as effective as possible. So the changes actually last. That's a big thing that we commonly see. People will start a protocol, they'll get some quick wins, they will feel better temporarily, but then the symptoms eventually return. So a lot of folks that come to us in our one to one practice have done that already, whether with another practitioner or another program or on their own, like a DIY jobby.
They're like, I put myself on a gut protocol, I felt so much better, but then the symptoms came back. So if we structure our protocol in the right way, in a methodical way, this shouldn't happen. And then the third reason that we take people through this five step process is it is a way to tend to the whole terrain, not just isolate one infection in the gut and say, oh, this is your problem right here. We found it, we address this and everything's better. So I'm going to talk a little bit more about why that matters so much in a little bit but the thing I want you to understand most is that healing the gut is a step wise process and we are getting the body ready for each subsequent step. It is layered, it is sequential, it is methodical. And that's why it works when we do it this way. And if that's the kind of care that you're looking for this year, you can apply to work with us.
2025 was such an incredible year for 1:1 practice. We served more clients than any other year prior and it's just incredible to be able to serve this many people and help this many people get better. So we're continuing to grow our practice and if you'd like to work with one of our practitioners on our team, you can head to the Show Notes to apply. And I also want to say that this five step process is how we train practitioners in FNA, the Funk’tional Nutrition Academy, our 14-month clinical mentorship and training program. And hey, guess what? Applications are officially open. Happy New Year. So we will link the application up in the Show Notes. If you are a practitioner who is looking to get this kind of training, I think this is a great podcast episode for practitioners today, but it's also going to be great for anybody who's just interested in getting healthy.
And actually the idea for this podcast came from you all. You are asking me questions on Instagram. So a few months ago I put myself on a gut protocol because here's what was going on for a few weeks, maybe like three, a three week chunk. Every single time I had a glass of wine, even one, even a small one, I usually do like half pours for myself. So even a half poor. I would get heart palpitations, severe headache, like a crushing headache, nausea, and I would feel hung over without even catching a buzz. So I like wouldn't be drunk, I wouldn't have a buzz, but I would have the experience of being hungover. Like before I even went to bed, I would feel hungover.
So all of this, collectively, this collection of little symptoms is a very obvious and overt histamine response, which is not uncommon for some people drinking wine. But it's very atypical for me because that is not typically how I respond to drinking wine. So something shifted. Like all of a sudden something changed. And around this same exact time, there were other things going on. I had severe acid reflux around the clock. So no matter what I did, no matter what I ate, I just had really bad heartburn. And I was also starting to get rash and hives on my eyelids, which is a little bit of like a body clue.
For me, that has happened before. And that's usually a way that my body is like, hey, something's up, something's going on, we need your attention, let's go. And I say all of this because the body and the body's communication system, which is symptoms, can be a little bit of a puzzle. And you really have to contextualize symptoms. So what I mean by that is asking what else is happening at the same time. And you can look like outside your body, like what's happening in my life at the time these symptoms pop up and what other symptoms inside the body are happening at the same time? Because it's all relevant. All the context clues, my guys, all the context clues are relevant. And that's really what a functional or root cause or holistic provider should be doing, is pulling all the context clues together.
And this, to me is a hallmark of a really great clinician. They're asking a lot of really great questions. And the reason they're doing this is because they're trying to contextualize your symptoms and what you're experiencing. So, for example, even when I'm just doing a lab analysis for somebody, like the gut panel, for example, so the gut panel is something that you can purchase on our website. It's a stool test and it's an analysis. And we have you fill out a brief intake form. Not like a super deep dive, like long winded health history form. It's pretty brief.
But I need that information in order to contextualize the data that I'm seeing on the lab. I would never just interpret someone's lab without knowing what their symptoms are, what they're experiencing, how long they've been experiencing it, what supplements they're taking, how they eat, et cetera. I need that information before, or we do, if you're a practitioner listening, we need that information before we can appropriately and effectively interpret lab results. So hear me. Part of successful lab interpretation is interpreting it with context. And this is why we say we're not just reading a lab, we're also reading the person behind the lab, which is equally, if not more important, you dig? So anyway, I started treating myself for H. Pylori. So that was my gut protocol.
I'm like, there's H. Pylori here. Stool test was positive. Wasn't surprised about that. Given my symptoms. That was very all H. Pylori esque. H. Pylori can trigger histamine release. It can contribute to acid reflux. H. Pylori doesn't always come with symptoms, but oftentimes one of the symptoms are like, more upper gi, like that acid reflux and then skin stuff can be a big hallmark of an H. Pylori infection. So it was all happening. Like Penny Lane said, it was all happening. So I put myself on a protocol and I shared on Instagram because day two or three into the protocol, I got a big rash on my face.
It was like a big bombastic reaction. I took a picture of myself and I showed you guys on Instagram. I put it in my stories, and a lot of you were super interested because you're like, oh my God. The same thing happened to me. You had so many questions. So let's talk about why that happened, why I got that big skin flare on day two or three of my protocol and what I did to resolve it. Because it's not an uncommon reaction. Like I said, with GUT protocols, if you do not take a stepwise approach, a methodical approach, and even sometimes if you do, you can get these reactions and then we have to kind of navigate those reactions.
But first, before we get into all of that, before we get into a GUT protocol, two things have to happen. And this is one of those episodes where you might want to take notes, you might want to listen a couple of times, because I'm going to give you a lot of info, but it's really good info.
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So we all know by now that gut health is important, right? Our microbiome influences the rest of the body, but our microbiome is also influenced by what's happening in the rest of the body too. So it works both ways. We always want to think about things in the body as a functioning unit, like all different things working together versus a reductionist view. But we've sort of been trained to think about the body as a reductionist view because that's really what conventional medicine offers us. It's like problem with the gut, go to gastro, problem with hormones, go to endocrinologist, problem with skin dermatologist, problem with vaginal ecology, go to the gyno. And we now know, understand, and chances are, if you've listened to this podcast for, I don't know, a couple weeks to eight years, you probably know and understand that with a more root cause approach, we are taking a comprehensive approach, meaning we're looking at all the different pieces and parts in the body, all the different organs and systems, and we're saying, hey, they're all talking to each other all of the time. But I will tell you that functional medicine has its own practice of sort of taking a reductionist view. And so when we think problem with the gut, oftentimes our first thought is to go right to the infection or the suspected infection.
So we want to go right into the kill protocol portion of a gut protocol, like kill the infection, kill the parasite, kill the yeast, kill whatever's there, and we treat it as an act of warfare, rather than taking a step back and saying, hey, what's the overall environment that created this problem in the first place? Why did the person get this infection in the first place? Truly figuring out root cause necessitates asking the question, why did this happen? Infections and overgrowths are not just a pathogen problem. Even though the wellness world online would have you believe that, even though sometimes templated functional medicine would have you believe that. It's like test infection, kill, done right, run the labs, find the problem, fix the problem via a protocol, and you're all better. And that can work in a small handful of cases. But like I talked about earlier, oftentimes if you don't change the environment that led to the infection in the first place, that thing is going to come rip roaring back or another problem is going to come back in its place. So we have to consider the terrain or the internal environment. And so that could look like thinking about chronic stress chemistry, the state of the nervous system, poor lymphatic drainage, poor sleep, a diet high in processed foods or low in variety. There's a number of different things and factors we have to consider when we're thinking about the environment or the terrain.
It's never just one thing that creates the internal terrain. So we can't expect to treat just one thing and get better. If you listen to the episode that I did with Meg o', Neill, which, by the way, go listen to that if you did not, I'm getting so much amazing, incredible feedback on that episode, and I enjoyed it so, so much. So it was such a gift to have her come on the show and talk about her experience. But with her situation, it was the gut, it was the liver, it was blood sugar, it was food sensitivities, it was diet, it was perfectionism, it was all or nothing mentality. And so that's why killing off the infection might provide temporary relief, but that infection can come back if we don't address the environment that allowed it to grow in the first place. So in her case, we did have to address a lot of different factors. Attacking overgrowths with a kill, eradicate war mentality is not effective when it's just happening in an isolated event.
It can absolutely be part of a gut healing protocol, and we use them often, for sure, in our own practice. But we also are shifting the internal terrain to get the body to a point where it feels safe enough to release. Okay, so the first thing that we have to do when considering a gut healing protocol is to consider is to ask the question why did this happen? And I won't get into all the different details here because I have eight years of podcasts that dive into different aspects of this and it's not always an easy or straightforward answer. But the. This really is the work that your practitioner should be doing, especially if they're putting you on a gut protocol. If somebody's putting you on a kill protocol without asking the question why, that is a red flag, in my humble opinion. Okay, then the second thing that has to happen. Before ever starting any type of gut protocol, you have to manage expectations.
Probably not what you are expecting me to say, but this stuff can take time. I would say give yourself three to six months, like minimum, depending on the person, depending on the situation, depending on what else is going on in the internal terrain. I think three to six months is a really safe bet. What I can tell you is that most of our clients are with us for about six months, sometimes a little bit longer for that, like real, true, comprehensive care and like, like full results. So just keep that in mind. And of course, we're not just doing gut protocols in our practice. We are taking a comprehensive approach that means full body, top to tail, tip to tail, top to bottom. Now the reason that I'm bringing this up is because we get a fair amount of prospective clients who fill out our application and ask if they can work with us or work with our team for one to two months so we can just start them on a protocol.
I'm assuming that if we see applications come in that are asking this, you guys have probably same questions. And the answer to that is we cannot. We don't require a minimum commitment because we can't tell you exactly how long it's going to take to heal. So it's month to month when you work with us. But also we won't start someone on a protocol that we aren't prepared to see all the way through. And here's why. Because things can pop up. It's not just a plug and play template that we use.
It's not a set it and forget it. We are tweaking and refining the whole time. Like I said earlier, we take a layered approach in reactions are not uncommon. So when they pop up, we have to decide, is this a die off reaction? Do we push through? Do we give the body more support or do we slow down or do we stop altogether and totally change gears? And that really depends on the situation in the person. This client of ours, she's working with Nicole right now and she just left this Comment on Instagram. So I wanted to share this with you because I think it really helps to exemplify what I'm trying to explain. But it's like, like real world scenario. She said.
I've been working with Nicole and she has helped support my body in so many ways. She has definitely helped me feel seen, also reassured when one protocol may not work that we have other avenues to try. I used to be filled with anxiety of where the next threat to my skin would come from, products, food, et cetera. Now I feel safe as I continue moving forward in my healing journey. So that is really the benefit of working with somebody one on one is because you have a continuous checkpoint to be like, hey, this is happening. Is this normal? And then Nicole can swoop in and be like, yeah, totally normal. We've got you. Or like, ooh, that probably shouldn't be happening.
Let's switch gears here. Don't worry. I have about 152 other tools in my tool bag that I can pull out at the exact right time. Like, we've got you. And I just want to say this as an aside. That feeling of safety that this client is talking about is so crucial because when the body doesn't feel safe, or when you don't feel safe and supported with a practitioner or in your protocol, it can keep your brain and body in hypervigilance. It can keep it locked into high alert mode, which is the exact opposite of where it needs to be in order to clear an infection. Your body needs to be in parasympathetic optimal healing mode.
It needs to feel safe to clear and release these things and to heal. So we're always encouraging clients to give themselves this time. Meg was another really great example of this. She's a success case. And the reason that she is a success case is because she took perfectionism, pressure off of herself. She gave herself time and space to not just heal the body, but also embed the identity of someone who is healthy. Like she discussed on that podcast episode, you cannot rush healing. And in fact, when we try to rush it, we're usually kind of fighting against ourselves.
You have to remember that for so many people, it can take years or even decades to get sick. So it's going to take a little bit of time to reverse that. It can take time to shift the microbial terrain. There is no quick fix. This doesn't happen overnight. And this anxious, angry quest for the answer, for the quick fix, for what we see on social media, this three step protocol that heals you in three to six weeks that actually can create more problems than solutions in your body. And the reality is it's not how it plays out in practice. It's actually so fucking left of what your biology actually requires.
So you have to ask yourself or your practitioner should be having this conversation with you. Are we working with the body's natural rhythms or against it? That should be consideration of any protocol. All right, so once we've considered both of those things, why did this happen? In managing expectations about timeline of healing, those two things, then we can get into the five steps that we consider before or during putting someone on a gut protocol in my reaction, my skin flare two to three days in was because I went in hot and heavy and I didn't feel follow the five steps that I'm about to lay out for you. I'm a human being and sometimes I was like, I got this, I got this. We're just going to go jump right into the kill protocol. I just wanted to go for it. And whoopsies. My body was like, girl, girl, get a grip.
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So I have an acronym for the five step process, because I love acronyms. This is what we teach our F and A practitioners and it's called have a blast because why not? If we're going to be doing this work, we should be having fun while we're doing it. So BLAST stands for bowels, liver adrenals, secretory, IGA and trauma. So let's address each and every one of those. We will start with bowels. We need to address constipation. If someone is struggling with constipation, we really need to try to get this moving first because when we kill things in the gut, we have to then, then poop them out. When we introduce antimicrobials or antifungals and we start killing things off, we can be disrupting biofilms. And when we're doing this, we're inevitably increasing the mobilization of a lot of things.
Lps, lip polysaccharides, mycotoxins, metabolites, biotoxins. And if these compounds are not efficiently cleared out, they can recirculate. They can enter the enterohepatic pathways and exacerbate your symptoms. And so this is oftentimes what we will see. With big reactions to kill protocols, everything that we are killing off has to be taken all the way to the toilet. We don't want it going back into circulation. That will make us feel bad. So we have to make sure our exit portals are opened up in order to actually do that.
So if you're constipated and you're on a kill process protocol, you are not going to feel great. So sometimes somebody's struggling with chronic constipation, this is the part that we have to work on first and foremost. Now there are certain situations where it's actually the overgrowths that is leading to the constipation. And then we have to use some clinical discernment and some critical thinking to determine how that happens and what step that happens. But that is something that you need to know. We have to be releasing anything that we're killing off. So kill protocol to plus constipation equals feeling bad. Number two is liver.
So the L stands for liver. We want to support the liver gut connection. Our intestines are really well supplied with venous blood that goes back to the liver. And so like we just discussed, bacteria, fungus, all these things that we're killing off can release endotoxins in the liver, can get overwhelmed pretty quickly, especially if there's other stuff going on in the liver, if it's dealing with other things, if there's methylation issues, so on and so forth. Hepatos, those are liver cells, are involved in the clearance of endotoxins. So they have a big job to play here. They've got a big role. The liver plays an important physiological role in detoxification.
We all know this. But when we kill off bacteria, they also play a role with that. And when those bacteria release biotoxins, your liver kind of needs to deal with them. So just understand that we have to support the liver. Most, if not all kill protocols should have some aspect of liver support along with them because we're going to ask it to a big job. So this is what I had to do. And that's really what solved my issue for me. I was like, oh, I have like zero liver support happening.
Great. So I threw in some liver support. Literally the supplement that I used is from vital nutrients. I really like that company and it's called Liver support. So pretty basic stuff. And I also threw in some binders. Binders can play a pretty supportive role in gut protocols because it helps to reduce the toxic and inflammatory load that we just talked about. And it does this by adsorbing mobilized compounds.
So it basically binds to these compounds that we're killing off in the lumen of the gut, in the intestine. And that helps to reduce absorption through the rest of the body. It helps to blunt the immune activation that might lead to those big bold die off reactions. So binders are something to consider to help to mitigate the die off reactions. There's different types of binders. Activated charcoal is example. Other examples are different Types of clay, chlorophyll, humic and fulvic acids can be helpful. So that might be something to do.
And again, it's gonna. It's not directly impacting the liver necessarily, but it is taking the load off of the liver because it's adsorbing those things right in the gut. And so then you can poop them out, but this step requires you to be pooping them out. Keep in mind, the next phase here is, or the next thing to consider is adrenals. So we need to address stress, chronic stress chemistry. So continuously high or dysregulated cortisol in stress hormones alters gut motility, it alters bile flow in other digestive juices, it alters immune signaling, it alters vagal tone, and it really creates an internal gut environment that makes overgrowths A more likely to happen, baby, B, more resilient, those gut critters become more resilient, and C, harder to eradicate and get rid of. So I've talked a lot, lot, lot, lot, lot about stress physiology and how it impacts the gut here on this podcast. So let's just do a brief overview.
High cortisol is more of a catabolic situation. So if you just have chronic unchecked stress, high cortisol stress chemistry pumping through your body, it starts to break down the body and specifically it degenerates and breaks down the lining of the gut. So the intestinal lining that opens the doorway for leaky gut. Your body isn't able to regenerate and repair the gut like it's supposed to. We can see compromised intestinal blood flow, which is also going to impact the body's ability to repair itself. We can see low vagal tone, so it impacts the vagus nerve and how that functions with the nervous system. So we can see issues with the gut brain access. Excess cortisol suppresses secretory iga, so it suppresses our intestinal immunity.
That leads to more bacterial and yeast overgrowth. Stress itself can really shift the microbiome to more unfavorable species and knock back our beneficial keystone bacteria. And then we can see immune cell priming. So when the immune cells are primed by stress hormones, they can become overly sensitive and hyper reactive. So it doesn't take as much of a trigger to cause that big bombastic heightened reaction. So we could see this with things like food sensitivities, but we can also see this with histamine reactions with MCAs, with other CHR chronic condition. It can be part of the reason why we're seeing reactions with our gut protocols. So in a nutshell, with stress, the gut can't heal.
It becomes harder to clear infections with ongoing persistent stress chemistry. So we have to be really, really honest with ourselves about this. And if this is not coming online with a gut protocol, your gut protocol is incomplete. Nine times out of 10, we have to think about our lifestyle, we have to think about our boundaries, we have to think about nervous system and including down regulating practices, things like yoga, meditation, breathing. This is, by the way, why we're now giving all of our clients access to our new app, Manifest yout Health. I'll talk about that at the end of the show. But we absolutely know that supporting the nervous system is such an important part of any gut healing protocol. And so we wanna give you all the tools at your fingertips to really be able to heal your gut.
Then the next one we have is, is the S, and that stands for secretory iga, which is a mucous membrane surface antibody that helps to keep pathogens and their toxins from adhering to the mucosal membrane. It helps to neutralize viruses, it prevents the immune system from overreacting to things, and it has other positive immune effects. So whenever I'm running a stool test on somebody, that is one of the first places that I'm looking. Where's their secretory IGA levels at? If they're low? That is really one of the first places that we start because the lower the secretory iga, the more prone to acquiring infections and the less likely you'll be to actually allow the infections to clear up. So if it's low, we actually have to bolster the immune function. And that might come in before we do a kill protocol. When we do a kill protocol, we are asking your immune system to do a big job. And if the immune system is already suppressed, which is if secretory IGA is low, it's telling us that our, our immune system, our gut's immune system is suppressed.
It's low, it's limping along. It's going to be a lot harder for us to clear out and eradicate any overgrowth and infection. So just keep that in mind. This is a big part of protocols that we put together for our clients. There are certain ways to improve secretory iga. Certain strains of probiotics can be helpful. Vitamin A can be helpful, certain immunoglobulins. So sometimes those are being worked into our protocols.
But the biggie here is to address stress. Remember that cortisol regulates the production of secretory IGA So we can see low secretory IGA with chronic ongoing stress. So that is a piece in a part. What can also be very helpful in bolstering secretory IGA is a gratitude practice, meditation, self compassion practices. All of these can be very effective. And again, that is why we are giving, giving our one on one clients access to Manifest yout Health because they will have all those practices right at their fingertips. So we can do it with supplements, but we also really like to do it with lifestyle as well. And just a quick clinical pearl before I move on to the last one.
If someone has low secretory iga, they're also more prone to respiratory infections, urinary tract infections and bladder infections. Because yes, secretory IGA works in the digestive tract, but it also is found in the sinus and the nasal cavity, respiratory system, bladder, vagina and urethra as well. Now we are gonna get on to the final one, which is T for trauma. And we cannot discount trauma's effects on the gut. And trauma is different than just some stress that you might be under, like present day stress in real time. Trauma is when there's too much too soon, too much for too long, there's not enough for too long. So neglect, for example, when power and agency have been taken away, when stressors outweigh the resources available to navigate them, and when there is not enough time, space, support to heal. So basically what happens with trauma is that there's just too much for our nervous system.
And our nervous system is like the surveillance system of the body. It's just too much for that system to handle. So as a result, we get stuck in inefficient nervous system states that are trying to act, help us navigate whatever the trauma was. And this is what is meant when you hear things like trauma lives in the body, or the body remembers, or even the body keeps the score. It's like the event is still happening inside of us. One of my somatic teachers says it lives inside of us in a raw or incomplete form because we didn't get to resolve what happened to us. The brain hasn't relegated trauma to the past, so it's reliving it like it's stuck still happening. And we know that with the ACE study, the higher your ACE score, adverse childhood experience, the higher your ACE score, the higher your risk of health problems.
And more specifically, there is tremendous research to showcase that when someone has a history of traumatic stress, they are more likely to have a gut disorder. Now I bring all of this up because it's important and it matters. And it's rarely part of a functional medicine medicine kill protocol. And I am certainly not suggesting that your functional medicine practitioner should be the one supporting you with your trauma. However, I do think it's an important part of this conversation because warring with a body that's already at war with itself is pretty ineffective. So we can't just take a super jacked up nervous system and then throw on a bunch of of herbal antimicrobials to kill infections and be like, our job here is done. We are healed. The body doesn't work like that.
It's just an incomplete approach. And so if you're listening to this and you've tried that incomplete approach with maybe varying degrees of success, but it didn't get you all the way better, I hope that this lands as validation in vindication and a reason, hey, maybe this is why so again, I will share that one thing we're going to be doing this year is giving all of our one to one clients access to our new app and new membership Manifest yout Health. Manifest yout Health includes somatic practices, nervous system rewiring, vagus, nerve activation, self hypnosis. All really effective and useful tools for when somebody is locked into a state that disallows healing. I'm going to share this quote with you that I read on Instagram recently. It's from clinical herbalist Adrienne Adriana Ayalas and she says in Amazonian and Mesoamerican cleansing rights, Calming the spirit always came before bitter herbs, breath, prayer, warmth and rest were used to shift the body out of fight or flight. So elimination could happen without shock Release is the safety when the body trusts the process. When the spirit feels safe, the body knows how to let let go.
And so there is this big tending to the spirit aspect of Manifest your Health that I'm really, really proud of and excited for people to access. There's a tremendous amount of science baked in, but we are also tending to your spirit. So today I will close out with three invitations for you depending on what you're looking for and where you're at. 1. If you have ongoing gut or health problems and you need a comprehensive root cause functional medicine approach like the one we're talking about here, work with us one on one. 2. If you've done the functional medicine work or you're working with another functional medicine provider and you're really looking for more of that, tend to the spirit work. Manifest yout Health is for you.
It is a brain body membership that blends systems biology and neuroscience with the deep inner work of nervous system regulation, subconscious rewiring, emotional release and energy healing. And it pairs so well with any other healing modality that you're doing. And then number three, three. If you'd like to be the kind of practitioner to offer this kind of work, FNA is for you. And like I said, applications for our spring cohort are already open. Hard to believe that I'm saying that we are already thinking about spring, but I hope that this was helpful. Please share with a friend or a colleague that you think could benefit from this episode. Again, Happy New Year.
I'm so honored and grateful and pleased to have you you here and I will see you next week.
Thanks for joining me for this episode of The Funk’tional Nutrition Podcast. Please keep in mind this podcast is created for educational purposes only and should never be used as a replacement for medical diagnosis or treatment. If you got something from today's show, don't forget, subscribe, leave a review, share with a friend, and keep coming back for more. Take care of you.